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LAYING BARE: the FATE of AUTHORSHIP in EARLY SOVIET CULTURE by Petre M. Petrov B. A. in Bulgarian Philology, Sofia University St

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LAYING BARE: the FATE of AUTHORSHIP in EARLY SOVIET CULTURE by Petre M. Petrov B. A. in Bulgarian Philology, Sofia University St View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by D-Scholarship@Pitt LAYING BARE: THE FATE OF AUTHORSHIP IN EARLY SOVIET CULTURE by Petre M. Petrov B. A. in Bulgarian Philology, Sofia University St. Kliment Okhridski, 1997 M. A. in Russian, University of Pittsburgh, 2000 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Petre Petrov It was defended on 5 December, 2006 and approved by Paul Bové, PhD Evgeny Dobrenko, PhD Peter Machamer, PhD Vladimir Padunov, PhD Dissertation Director: Nancy Condee, PhD ii Copyright © by Petre M. Petrov 2006 iii LAYING BARE: THE FATE OF AUTHORSHIP IN EARLY SOVIET CULTURE Petre M. Petrov, PhD University of Pittsburgh The thesis examines the transition from post-revolutionary Soviet culture (1917-1928) to the culture of the Stalinsist period, arguing for a crucial transformation in the status of agency, subjecthood, and authorship between these two historical and cultural frames. I contend that Soviet culture has much to tell us about that momentous event of the twentieth century, the “death of author” or, more broadly, the “death of the subject”—an event that Western thought has illuminated from various perspectives (philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, structural anthropology, political economy, etc.). The analysis proceeds from a consideration of prominent literary and aesthetic theories of the 1910s and 1920s—Formalism, the sociological criticism of the “Pereverzev school,” the artistic platforms of left avant-garde, the ideological positions of RAPP, etc.—in an attempt to present these often divergent currents of thought and praxis as homologous, as participating in the same “act”: the cultural act of modernism. Characteristic of this act, I argue, is the attempt to transcend the dimension of the individual subjective and, in this very transcendence, institute an impersonal, suprahuman objectivity. The symbolic price for reaching this state of superhuman truth is the “instrumentalization” of human agency. The concrete result of the modernist act is Stalinism: a world in which the very production of truth and reality is coterminous with the ritualistic surrender of agency and autonomy. In the thesis’ second part, I discuss socialist realism as a concrete instance of this surrender, seeking to iv demonstrate to what extent the position of the so-called “representing subject” in socialist realism is antinomic with the notion of authorship. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: THE DEATHS OF THE AUTHOR ............................................................... 1 PART I .......................................................................................................................................... 18 CHAPTER ONE: THE OBJECTHOOD OF FORM................................................................ 19 CHAPTER TWO: THE SUBJECTHOOD OF CONTENT ..................................................... 40 CHAPTER THREE: ORGANIZATION.................................................................................. 60 CHAPTER FOUR: IMPERATIVE OBJECTHOOD ............................................................... 74 CHAPTER FIVE: IMPERATIVE SUBJECTHOOD............................................................... 96 PART II....................................................................................................................................... 117 CHAPTER ONE: MATTERING AND MANNING ............................................................. 118 CHAPTER TWO: THE UNBEARABLE LIGHT OF BEING .............................................. 150 CHAPTER THREE: THE MATTER OF IDEOLOGY ......................................................... 173 CHAPTER FOUR: THE BLIND, THE SEEING, AND THE SHINY.................................. 196 CHAPTER FIVE: LIFE HAPPENS ....................................................................................... 232 CONCLUSION: THE MANA OF STALINISM ....................................................................... 249 BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................... 261 vi The existence of proletarian dictatorship is not enough to influence culture. For this, a true plastic hegemony is needed, a hegemony that would speak through me without my knowing it, or even against my will. I do not feel this. Boris Pasternak vii INTRODUCTION: THE DEATHS OF THE AUTHOR Farmhand Who are you? Whose are you? Things What do you mean, “whose”? Farmhand I mean, what is your master’s name? Things We have no master. We belong to no one. (Mayakovsky, Mystery-Bouffe) Something happened to the author in the century just past, something bad. It was even announced that the author is no more—a startling announcement. But what does it mean? What exactly happened? Any investigation into this alleged fatality must begin, I believe, with two “happenings” of the early twentieth century, happenings that took place in two patently incongruous dimensions. The first of them is the dislocation between sign and referent that has severed, for an indefinite time, the reality of the text from any reality “out there.” The other is the emergence, in a Europe still committed to the values of the Enlightenment, of oppressive political regimes that conscripted artistic creativity for the production of prescribed realities. The first of these happenings precipitated what might be called the “theoretical death of the author”— the moment in European thought when the author, as the last and most tenacious of the text’s referents, was demoted to the level of the signified, alongside the text’s other fictions. The 1 second happening amounted to a second death, this one palpably more real, if less universal, than the first: a death in history, which occurs when a political power wrestles authorship away from the individual, thus making him/her into a mere craftsman of the mandated text. These two deaths appear, at first, to be ontologically disparate. One is a concrete demise, occurring in very specific historical circumstances, in which historically concrete human beings submit to very real pressures, surrender precious “artistic freedoms,” renounce, recant, resign, rewrite. The other is an abstract death occurring “only in theory,” as if only in effigy, for it concerns not the actual person of the author, but only his immaterial ghost within the text. In the most famous obituary to the author, Roland Barthes’s article of 1968, the exorcism of this ghost is accompanied by a distinct feeling of relief: rescued from what has never been more than a cultural construct, a historically contingent apparition, the text is finally left to itself and to the internal freedom it has always potentially possessed. There is certainly a sense in which this second death is also a historically specific event. How can it not be, if the birth and precarious existence of the author belong to a moment in history?1 Yet that which is set free—the true life of the text in the revel of the “writerly” and the true calling of the reader in the infinite disentangling of textual traces—all this is trans-historical (“No doubt it has always been that way” [Barthes 119]). How can this theoretical “destruction of the Author” (Barthes 120), which sees itself as a revolutionary act, an act of liberation,2 be analogous to that other destruction, which authorship 1 “The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages and English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’” (Barthes 119). 2 “In […] this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret,’ an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases— reason, science, law” (Barthes 122; emphasis added). 2 suffers at the hands of totalitarian power? One is a cause for celebration; the other elicits morose historical and ethical reflections. In one instance, someone jubilates at the removal of an obstacle that bars supra-individual forces and energies—the forces and energies of discourse— from taking legitimate possession of the text. In the other, someone bewails the removal of a piece of human interiority that bars the supra-individual “truths” of totalitarian discourse from writing themselves directly into the artistic text. Despite this difference in mood and the apparent heterogeneity of what is being buried— in one case, a cultural apparition, in the other, artistic individuality and freedom—how can we not suspect that these two funerals take place on the same ground, that they are made possible by the same positivity? This common ground opens with the realization that some significant part the individual, or, “as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’” (Barthes 119), perhaps precisely the part that defines him as a human person and individual, constitutes an obstacle. Then, the demand is not long in coming for the author to disappear into “a prerequisite impersonality, to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’
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